“It’s given us a much wider perspective”: exploring the domestication of design thinking into sport management practice

Abstract

ABSTRACT The perpetual evolution of sport users highlights human-centred challenges for sport organisations who aim to serve their users optimally. This study looks to the broader field of management to identify design thinking – a human-centred means of generating value for users – as a concept that might enable sport organisations to identify and fulfil the unmet needs of their users. A qualitative case study approach was used to explore how a professional sport organisation “domesticated” a design thinking activity – the Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) – into its practice. The organisation was found to have intuitively modified the LDJ to meet their needs. Adopting the LDJ was also found to have improved the organisation’s practice in several ways, including the structured implementation of reflection and, thus, the enhanced generation of organisational knowledge.